


reprise

by psalloacappella



Series: fix me with your grace [4]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Back on my angst train, Blank Period, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Prison Release, SSBlankPeriod2021, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:41:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29050821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psalloacappella/pseuds/psalloacappella
Summary: So then, so now. In the simmering tangerine heat, she stands waiting in knee-high boots and the skirt he’s seen her in so often, and he commits her shape to memory through each stage of the return of his sharp sight.❦For #SSBlankPeriod2021Day 4 Prompt(s): Teamwork // "I'll protect you."
Relationships: Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Sasuke
Series: fix me with your grace [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2125785
Comments: 10
Kudos: 75





	reprise

❦

He’s released into a humid dawn with nothing to his name but guilt and the clothes on his back. Things borrowed — the bruises under his eyes, blue. 

Emerging from the other side of something indescribable, carrying much more but somehow much less than he arrived with. 

Feeling light without the chains of metal and melancholy, the weight of all he’s done. A cyclical cadence of small cold rooms lit by garish bare bulbs and sneers barely concealed by skeptical guards, the entreaties of the interrogation unit, unsure if the gradually softening questions are piteous or a tactic. The same stories to different ears, and the people who adore him creeping at the corners and doors to ensure his treatment is humane.

As the “assigned medic,” as one of the few determined to be able to have even a chance of preventing an escape he has no desire to execute, she’s been his doctor since the first day and his advocate throughout, bringing a semblance of level headedness to the proceedings that Naruto, bless him, isn’t talented in articulating. He’d prefer to raise his voice, brandish fists if he has to, the declaration that he’ll come to blows for his best friend.

So then, so now. In the simmering tangerine heat, she stands waiting in knee-high boots and the skirt he’s seen her in so often, and he commits her shape to memory through each stage of the return of his sharp sight. 

They speak around him, Sakura and the last shinobi guard. He lets them.

“He’s been released into my care,” she says stubbornly, folding her arms. Tapping her foot. 

The guard has clear reservations, regards her with skepticism.

A fluttering flare of her nostrils, a habit he noticed on day twenty-six; but really, it had only been a forgotten tic of yesteryear, a habit Naruto or even their sensei never failed to induce in her. 

“I’m his . . . doctor. I’ll take this from here, thank you.” The acknowledgement is perfunctory, with an edge of dismissal.

She doesn’t unfold her arms or let them fall to her sides until the guard’s long gone, reporting to his next post or perhaps the Hokage’s office, the smoke from his departure whirling and blending with the ripple of a rising summer heat.

Sakura turns, careful to avoid his eyes.

“I suppose that’s that. It’s nice to see you, Sasuke-kun.”

Resists the urge to say he saw her yesterday, and the idiot too, that they’d been around spending far too much time with a criminal, even if newly pardoned. His upcoming stint of house arrest still indicates otherwise.

He knows all the words that would be kind, human, and reasonable to say. Embodying any of those personal qualities would be nice. Instead:

“Why are you here?”

“Actually, I moved around my schedule to make sure I’d be here.”

“I didn’t ask for that.”

“I know.”

She’s not miffed or bothered by him, and that’s what hurts the most. That she expects him to be this: Curt, angry. Broken, fragile. Physically he’s coming together; mentally he’s held up with thin, fraying strings.

She inhales before beginning again, already sounding wary of his potential response. 

“For now they’ve assigned you to your previous living space. In the old district.” For all her poise and command when beholding the human body, ever the professional, the fusion of skin and sinew and soul in need of tender loving repair, she’s fiddling with the edge of her skirt and all he wants to do is make her stop.

“I said it wasn’t a good idea,” she adds, intent on staring just past his ear. “No one has been there for years. It’s not your burden.”

“It’s fine.” The strain of unuse, and a little swift. A little mean. Without any further gesture, he turns and heads down the street, the gravitational pull of family ghosts too strong to defy. Then he stops, realizing he’s awkward, unsteady, and forever difficult to read.

Looks at her over his shoulder.

“I’m your escort.” She sounds apologetic, quiet.

He wills her to look him in the eyes, but won’t meet hers. Oh, what does that make him? A coward at best.

He waits until she catches up, their difference in height more than he remembers. 

The sensation of her lingering at his shoulder, though, sears through his bones as the catalyst heat of sparks on flint, a familiar biological imprint that feels like coming home.

  
  
  


Three days in a row, she comes to his doorstep.

Three days in a row, she pleads her case. 

“Do you think this is good for you? Emotionally, I mean. Sleeping with the ghosts of your past?”

The first attempt to shake her loose goes poorly, and Uchiha Sasuke experiences for the first time and certainly not the last how charmingly infuriating it is to have her stubborn nature focused on him, a spotlight.

Ignoring her questions, unwilling to place a fine point on his obvious dysfunction. “Why are you here, Sakura?”

“What part of ‘released into my care,’ escapes you? You wouldn’t have liked the alternative.”

Each morning visit reveals a wilder man: A little more gaunt, covered in an additional thin layer of dust. She’s terrified the house, this cursed and unforgiving compound moaning his name, will take him back, as moss commandeers the forest floor, as nature reclaims its kin. 

“You at least need to eat. Turn on some lights, open windows.”

Sasuke stares at nothing, everything, and in some terrifying moments, only her.

Pressing her knuckles to her lips as she wanders the old rooms, a tomb of memories laden with the skeletons of furniture, saturated with the kinesthesia of many extinguished lives; swiping fingers across surfaces choked with dust; surreptitiously checking that his pillows are comfortable and that curtains get opened and he eats (which, she notes, he isn’t.)

He refuses to engage and watches her silently — simply living, breathing, feels draining — but not once does he order her to go.

  
  


She permits his behavior only until Day 4 — so, not very long at all.

Different, with her hair pulled back behind a cloth band of a cheerful color, carrying a box of haphazardly-packed supplies. They stand on the doorstep mirroring one another’s unease, suspended in a place that’s not quite friendship and now, far from war enemies, but a shade of something encompassing nuances beyond. 

“If you insist on living among ghosts,” she says, soft but firm, “let’s at least make this all more hospitable.” 

Perhaps she notices the way his eyes soften, though he still has trouble facing her head-on. Too bright, earnest, willing to forgive. 

_I didn't ask you to love me._

Voicing none of this, he instead raises an eyebrow at the box. 

“Seems to be more than soap in there.” 

A sliver of a moment in which she meets his charcoal eyes — it’s enough to dim the summer sun, melt his bones. Burn down the world.

It cannot be, and here, now, the premonition intuited but not understood in boyhood: Anyone entangled with him will perish.

Together they could catch fire.

Briskly, to distract from her blush, she readjusts the box in her arms. 

“There’s food in here, too. And gloves for all four of us, though I’m sure Naruto’ll forgo them.”

“Us?”

“He’s wanted to see you, and we can’t do this on our own.” A pause before she forges ahead, words skipping and speeding up, gathering courage, avoiding his interjections. “I can order them to the yards and common areas, if you’d rather they don’t touch your things. I understand.” 

“You don’t need to do any of this,” he says quietly.

The way her eyes sharpen, albeit glimmering with tears, makes Sasuke feel as though he’s losing his control on the little shred of it he might have had.

“We are _always_ a team. And you and I — we can be one too! I know I can’t save you, fix you. But,” she sniffles, voice in vibrato, “we can at least be _something._ ”

He eases the box from her hands, turning his back on her expression of surprise, of wariness. It’s the first time he’s implied she can come in, rather than her opening the door to his makeshift tomb.

Down a hallway, dim and chilled, she follows close behind. The wisps of socks on cold floors, the only sound in silence.

She reaches out.

He tenses, but like so many times under her touch he relents. Lets her fingers weave into the material of his shirt and hold him in place.

If he didn’t feel her, the misty quality of her voice could be calling from another planet.

“I know you believe you deserve this. To be among these ghosts, these dead spirits, as penance. And if that’s what you want, I suppose I can’t stop you. I never could.”

A tether. If she releases him, he has no doubt he’ll absolutely drown.

“But if they come for you, Sasuke-kun, make it hard for you to breathe . . . I’m here, okay?”

He stifles a noise, a growl and a sob and a sigh. Tries to stop her from sinking into him further, becoming sewn to the tapestry of his cursed history. “Sakura—”

But she is his, as she’s always been,

and she is fierce.

(And they end, begin again, forever something old and something new.)

“I’ll protect you.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the SSBlankPeriod2021 series, which is going on this week. Def peep that hashtag for sweet, sweet content from our talented fandom!
> 
> Ya'll I scrapped this twice and work has been intense but every time someone expresses how something I've written made them feel I am so humbled. I hope you know how much that means 😭😭


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